Recently I found a truly remarkable document. Do you want to see it?

Are you sure?

Maybe you should sit down for this.

Ready?

Okay, here goes…

(Drumroll)

Ta Da!

Impressive huh? Were you blown away? Overwhelmed with wonder?

No?

Well, really you should be.

This is the very first concept I had for my book, “Poison Tree Path“: – a couple of names (some of which fortunately changed); ages (most of them got older as I wrote); relationships, and a vague notion of where the story would lead. To me this really is an astounding document. It is almost inconceivable that a 125,000 word book grew from this one rough, messy little spider diagram!

It reminds me that everything we do in life has to start with a tiny seed. Five years ago, most people would have scoffed at my diagram, brushed it aside as silly or irrelevant and–if they were blunt–told me to find another dream. Maybe this teaches us to be careful of who we share our dreams with, and the stage at which we share them. My small budding seed that grew into a book could easily have been crushed before it had a chance to grow.

Looking at the other side of the coin, it should remind us too, to be encouragers of other dreamers who may as yet have a mere seed or the smallest of sprouting plants.

The final lesson I draw from this, is that growth takes time and requires patient, gradual output. I’ll never be Jeffrey Archer or Karen Kingsbury who pump out books by the dozen. But three or four sessions of writing a couple of hundred words in a week, a few years of perseverance, and I finally had a book.

I am planning to frame my spider diagram. At some stage I will need a new seed for a new book, but I may doubt myself, thinking I couldn’t create something from nothing all over again. That’s when I’ll need to look at it.

See how remarkable a document it really is?

What seed of a dream do you have?

 

Seed Image from Freedigitalphotos.net